Michaela Watkins on Her Leap from Supporting to Lead in Hulu’s Casual, and Online Dating

Since her season-long stint on Saturday Night Live, Michaela Watkins has become one of the most prolific scene-stealing actresses in comedy (Trophy Wife, Wet Hot American Summer, New Girl). But in Jason Reitman’s excellent Hulu dramedy Casual, which premieres on Wednesday, audiences will come to realize that they’ve been underestimating the actress for the past seven years.

In Casual, Watkins stars front and center, trading broad for broken, as Val, a newly divorced single mother who uproots her sexually liberated teenage daughter, Laura (Tara Lynne Barr), to live with her brother, Alex (Tommy Dewey). Together, the trio struggle to find their personal footing amid family dysfunction, and Watkins is given the screen time to steep in her character—a privilege she was never really allowed before.

“It's funny because when you play a lot of supporting parts for the majority of your career, you are used to a functionality of coming into a scene just to give exposition,” Watkins laughs during a recent phone call. “But this has been really nice to get all of the connective tissue that makes the character tick, and then the fact that they also film those in-between moments [for the character] is so new to me.

“There is a scene [in Casual] that is me walking around in a bra and putting on makeup without any dialogue as [my character is] getting ready to go out on a date,” Watkins explains with some degree of incredulity. “The fact that someone wanted to tame a camera on me while I put on makeup . . . ” She laughs, “No one has ever cared what my character was doing when she was out of the room.”

“It’s really satisfying to play a fully fleshed-out person,” Watkins continues. “I usually do more broad, where I am taking on a character. But this felt like the first time where I was bringing a lot of myself to a character.”

Asked to expand on how her personal experiences informed Val, Watkins says, “For better or worse, I think [this project] came at the right time. While I’m happily married now, I met my husband when I was at Valerie’s age, so I had a lot of heartbreak . . . There’s that thing where you are in your late 30s and your whole world breaks apart a little bit, and you look out into that landscape of new and different and you don’t know how you fit into it anymore and have to rebuild yourself in a new way, but not without regression and devolution.”

The series presents an interesting juxtaposition in the online-dating-verse. Val’s brother, Alex, created a dating app and games the system to try to manipulate his own romantic fate. Val, meanwhile, could not feel less in control of her dating life, reverting to an awkward teenager while her daughter seems sexually wise beyond her years. Watkins, if thrown back into single-dom, feels as though she would completely relate to Val’s struggle to re-enter the dating pool.

“Dating is already scary but I feel like with online dating now there are so many choices,” Watkins says. “You can just swipe left or right. That you can click a box that snuffs out an entire age group is crazy to me.” Watkins is quick to clarify that she has met plenty of people who have successfully online dated—her writing partner, she says, even found his wife on eHarmony. She just thinks she would be “terrible at it.”

The first few episodes of the series unfurl at a nice leisurely pace as Val, a competent psychologist who can help her patients work through their fucked-up lives, wrestles with her own. Because of this relaxed timing, Casual feels more like an indie film broken up into chapters than a drama series.

“The pacing doesn’t insult our audience’s intelligence, I think,” Watkins agrees. “It lets people discover the characters without having them shoved down their throats. Those first two or three episodes almost feel like the first act of an indie movie.”

While Watkins shines in more dramatic terrain, and speaks articulately about the complexities of her character, she’s still as quick with a joke as you'd hope given her her comedic résumé.

When we ask how she prepared for the role on Casual, Watkins deadpans, “I divorced a guy. ‘Honey, this is going to hurt me more than it’s going to hurt you. But it’s for art.’”